Abstract
This paper argues for a pragmatic perspective on discourse, delimiting discourse from context, and from arbitrarily concatenated discourse units. It argues for a relational conception of discourse unit whose form and function depends on the frame of investigation, and proposes to adapt the concepts of pragmeme and pract. A micro pragmeme may be realized by an utterance or by the minimal form of discourse connective counting as a communicative act. A meso pragmeme spans over various micro pragmemes, which count as a sequence, and a macro pragmeme spans over some more or less delimited number of meso pragmemes counting as discourse genre or activity type. Analogously to the differentiation between type and token, a pragmeme with a contrastive function may be realized with the practs well or but, with a meso pract with a challenging function, or with the macro pragmeme of review. A continuative pragmeme may be realized by practs focussing on temporal or argumentative continuation.
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Notes
- 1.
Discourse connective is used as an umbrella term including discourse markers and pragmatic markers, to name but the most prominent ones (cf. Fetzer 2012).
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Fetzer, A. (2016). Pragmemes in Discourse. In: Allan, K., Capone, A., Kecskes, I. (eds) Pragmemes and Theories of Language Use. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43491-9_14
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